ByteDance is looking for a developer to take on the second phase of its data centre project at the Pecém industrial port in Ceará, on Brazil’s north-east coast. The site is already the largest computing asset the company owns outside China, and the next stage may be bigger than the one now under construction.
Bloomberg reported the search on 6 November, citing people familiar with the matter. It also reported early talks over a separate campus of similar size outside the port, which would serve Brazilian customers rather than export traffic. ByteDance has not commented publicly on any of the plans.
USD 39 billion and one gigawatt
The first phase broke the usual frame for Latin American IT infrastructure. Reports in July 2026 put planned investment at about USD 39 billion, with initial IT capacity of roughly 200 megawatts and a long-run target close to one gigawatt. The park was drawn up with around 20 machine halls, added in stages.
Omnia, the data centre operator running the build, began construction in early 2026 and is targeting commercial operation in the third quarter of 2027. To carry the power load, Omnia signed a long-term wind supply agreement with renewables developer Casa dos Ventos worth about USD 2 billion.
For scale, Equinix’s newest São Paulo facility, SP6, represents an investment of USD 114 million and is measured in cabinets rather than hundreds of megawatts. The Pecém campus was never in the same category.
The tax clause that shapes the map
The second campus ByteDance is exploring sits outside the port perimeter, and the reason is written into the incentive design. Facilities inside the Pecém export processing zone must direct their capacity at data exports to qualify for local tax relief. A site built for Brazilian domestic customers cannot sit inside that boundary.
That gives the project two business models under one corporate roof: an export-oriented compute block aimed at global traffic, and a domestic block aimed at Brazilian users. Very few Chinese platform companies have attempted that split in a single market.
Why Brazil, and why now
Chinese platform firms have spent two years working around two constraints that pull in opposite directions. Beijing has tightened rules on where Chinese data and Chinese compute can be located. Washington has tightened which advanced chips can be sold into China at all.
Land, power and permitting in north-east Brazil resolve part of that problem. Electricity there is cheap and largely renewable, the state government has been actively courting hyperscale tenants, and the site is physically distant from the export control perimeter that governs advanced silicon.
The remaining question is silicon. A campus sized for a gigawatt needs accelerator supply for years, and no Chinese buyer has a settled answer to that yet. Omnia’s construction schedule will run ahead of that answer either way.
What the Pecém build does prove is that the constraint on Chinese AI expansion is no longer only chips. It is also electricity, land and political permission, and ByteDance has decided to buy all three somewhere else.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original 36Kr report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://36kr.com/p/4058857119307397.